Wow, everyone seems to bake so much! There's only the four of us here, so much as I love baking I don't go overboard as then I would just eat everything - not good.
I'll make some mince pies and some mini fruit cakes but that will probably be it. Too early yet, I'll do them next week when I'm not working.

The desire to bake seemingly goes down exponentially through the generations...My grandma cooked up a storm and her kitchen table was stacked with all of them. She'd make fudge, cookies, sugared nuts, Christmas morning bread (kind of a really dense break with the candied fruit that usually goes in fruit cake...not my cup of tea, but my dad loaves it), lemon bread, real bread, homemade caramel, homemade caramel corn, something I think was called summer sausage, though why it was cooked during Christmas when it was called summer sausage is beyond me. And tons of pies, but always a mincemeat pie, which no one but my grandparents ate, sooo...yeah, it got chucked.

My mom used to make a some of these when we were younger, but kind of doesn't anymore. I remember fudge (that always got chucked in the garbage because she was the only one who ate it and it was so rich she only at like 3 pieces and couldn't figure out how to successfully half the recipe, it always came out wrong somehow). Caramel and caramel corn was always made and so good and sticky you could probably pull your own tooth if you didn't wait for it to warm up a bit in your mouth. Lemon bread and Christmas morning bread (which also got chucked because she made like 4 loaves when my dad was the only one who ate it...), and pies...lots and lots of pies. So many it boggled my mind. No mincemeat.

I don't really like sweets and while I am a very good baker, hate it. So...yeah...I've got the recipes for the ones I like, but have never made them outside my mother's house. I've got tons of coworkers now that would love them and inhale whatever food is brought in, but I just don't care enough for the baking or candy making process to actually do it for anybody like my mom or grandma did. Maybe my sister will carry on the cooking line, she has a family and cooks more in one week that I do in 3 months. The only recipes for dinner I know to cook feed 7 or more people...bring that down to me and I'm hosed. I'm also a cheater cook, if it's not relatively easy to cook or at least put together, I'm not terribly interested in coming home from work and putting a complicated dinner together. Or cooking them on the weekends when I could be doing other things.

2B...ishhttp://public.fotki.com/SunshineGrrl/ pw: dramaProducts
This area is under construction as my hair type changed and nothing works well for me. I shampoo, I condition and pretty much have done nothing but chuck my hair in a messy bun for the past oh...year? Yeah, I'm that lazy.

No...going no-poo or CG does not work for me. It leaves me overconditioned and oily in a second no matter what I use, so that's not what's not working.

There will only be 6 of us and none are really big sweet eaters. I will be making homemade bread, as far as baking goes & desert will be ambrosia salad. I can christmasy it up by adding red and green maraschino cherries.

I also do a few candies. I'm going to do buckeyes, fudge, and maybe truffles. Danae was talking about doing chocolate lollipops, so I might buy some molds for those, too, since those are pretty easy. I also do homemade cocoa mix. This year I might pulverize some candy canes for a peppermint mix. I did homemade marshmallows last year, but since I don't have a stand mixer, they're kind of a pain in the butt.

I think I'm going to make marshmallows wrapped in an apple cider caramel sheet. I have tons of apple cider jelly and boiled cider. I'm just trying to decide on flavor combo. Maybe rum marshmallows and mulled cider, or plain cider and gingerbread marshmallows.
And maybe I'll make nougat again this year.

Cookie exchange is tonight and you'd think it was Christmas lol. My kids are soooo excited! They are lurking upstairs waiting to see what kind of cookies arrive. I'll be lucky if the 12 dozen cookies last until next week much less Christmas.